Emerging Technologies and Risk: How Do We Optimize Enterprise Risk When Deploying Emerging Technologies?

Emerging Technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), and distributed ledger continue to transform businesses, enabling new value creation in transformative ways. Importantly, most investigations and the broader scholarly discourse is around applications. In addition to the potential impacts on society, these technologies create risks, which even in the corporate context are not easily identified or evaluated and therefore cannot be easily addressed. The risks are both upside risks (opportunities or rewards) and downside risks (exposures that jeopardize the company). Can these risks be identified and evaluated? If so, what models might work for evaluating and perhaps even optimizing risk? In this study, we will first explore what technologies are being deployed and where the organizational risk is being considered or evaluated from a governance perspective within the organization. Based on interviews with executives facing these new environments, we developed the over-arching research questions: What theories guide our thinking best in terms of developing risk optimization models? What might these risk models look like? The research involved an exploration using a survey instrument and multiple qualitative methods involving business leaders from companies deploying these technologies as well as the development and preliminary testing of three different risk optimization models using scenario analysis data. Based on this analysis, we developed the foundations for a risk model executives could use to consider these technologies.